Folk Jews
Bernard Malamud was a writer
with a real genius for evoking the cosmic and the transcendent; but reading his
Complete Stories makes me think that transcendence has its limits.
Malamud was born in Brooklyn in 1914 (and died in 1986), and he grew up in the
kind of immigrant environment in which little children, because they are the
native-born half of a foreign-born neighborhood, are obliged to shield their
vulnerable elders from the contempt of the outside world. It was a background,
as I imagine it, that led naturally to the Malamudian insight that visible life
is a veil, behind which can be glimpsed, by means of sympathetic insight, a
vaster and more beautiful reality.
The
heroes of his early stories, from the 1940s and '50s, tend to be poor,
inarticulate shopkeepers and workers (tailors, grocers, shoemakers,
census-takers--Malamud almost always identified his characters by profession,
in a bow to the proletarianism of the '30s), New York Jews mostly, whose rough
outer appearances suddenly fall away to reveal inner souls of the purest
lyrical passion. Or else he writes about strange, grief-stricken, lonely souls,
perhaps half-mad, who seem to have been picked up like leaves by some
inexplicable wind and blown around the world until they attach themselves
randomly to the first unlucky person who comes their way. Sometimes the author
himself seems to float upward on a gust of wind, into the airy zones of fable,
which seem to have been his instinctive home.
In "The Jewbird," a melancholy black bird named Schwartz
lands on the balcony of a New York family and insists on being taken care of--a
sad nuisance of a talking bird, fleeing God knows what tragedies (the bird
says, "Gevalt , a pogrom!" and complains about "anti-Semeets"--to which
one of the family members replies, "What kind of anti-Semites bother a bird?").
A "Talking Horse," in the story of that name, turns out to be a half-man or
centaur named Abramovitz, cruelly disguised as an authentic horse and forced to
entertain circus audiences with pathetic jokes. The fabulist images are
wonderful and mysterious precisely because, in Malamud's hands, they seem
perfectly believable, an effortless demonstration that the grotesqueries of
workaday existence are merely masks.
He
sketches his stories usually with a few bold colors and fewer details, as in a
Raphael Soyer painting. His language is notable mostly for the
oniony taste of Yiddish, when it is appropriate: "Who comes on Friday night to
a man that he has guests, to spoil him his supper?" But you come away from
these colors and tastes with the feeling that Jewishness for Malamud is more
than ethnic, that the weird little events in his tales correspond to unseen
doings in the cosmos of an Old World folk-Judaism. In one of his later stories,
"The Silver Crown" from 1972, a high school teacher visits a raggedy
wonder-rabbi in the rundown Bronx who builds a miracle crown for nearly $1,000.
And though the schoolteacher concludes that the wonder-rabbi is a con artist,
we ourselves, the readers, are not so sure. The talking Jewbirds and centaurs,
the wonder-rabbis and the magic silver crowns--all seem to hint at larger,
transcendent truths.
But where can these larger truths be found?
Sometimes Malamud pointed to art, especially to painting and sculpture, which
he elevated into an ideal. He devoted a number of his later stories to an
artist named Fidelman who goes to live in Italy, which move occasions all kinds
of theorizing about art and its meaning. But the effect is gassy:
"Form may be and often is
the content of Art."
"You don't say."
"I do indeed."
Other times, he looked to
love and tried to put a little flesh on his spiritual creations, in an effort
to endow his poor, suffering Jews with at least a few shreds of a romantic
life.
But in
these stories, especially the later ones, he seems to have been unable to get
beyond his own commonplace fantasies about prostitutes and 1960s miniskirts.
Fidelman takes up with a prostitute in "A Pimp's Revenge," a student confesses
her hooker past in "A Choice of Profession," a father trails after his
streetwalker daughter in "God's Wrath," a doctor imagines his neighbor as a
"semi-prostitute" in the story "In Retirement"--it gets to be a little much.
The writing leers, for want of any better way to conjure a sexual attraction.
Malamud's daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, has just now brought out a book called
Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life , in which she says
that, coming across a sexual scene in one of her father's novels, she put the
book down in embarrassment, out of daughterly modesty. But even a nondaughter
could feel that way. I reached a point in reading The Complete Stories
where the arrival of a new young woman in any given story made me roll my
eyes--not because Malamud's masculine reveries are particularly scandalous, but
because the reveries seem scandalously inadequate to the cosmic hintings of his
other stories.
One of his first stories of love, "The First Seven Years,"
from Partisan Review in 1950, strikes me as nearly perfect, though. A
poor immigrant Jew works as an assistant shoemaker, patiently waiting for the
master shoemaker's daughter to grow old enough to marry. The assistant
shoemaker is another of Malamud's weirdly insistent, lonely souls--impelled,
who knows why, to devote himself to a hopeless love; still wincing from the
horrors of Europe, which he has not entirely escaped; inarticulate, yet
bursting with passion, if only his boss, the master shoemaker, will deign to
listen.
"You are crazy," the boss
says to him about his love for the girl. "She will never marry a man so old and
ugly like you." But she will, of course, which is going to be too bad. The
story is moving. It arouses wonder. Biblical overtones--the tale of Jacob and
Laban--bubble up from Malamud's simplicity. In his introduction, Robert Giroux,
Malamud's editor, quotes Cynthia Ozick, who said of Malamud: "Is he an American
master? Of course." Which is right--sometimes.
It was inevitable that
Malamud's editor would bring out a Complete Stories . Completeness is not
always a virtue, though. The lesser stories in the Complete edition cast
a wrong light on the greater ones. Malamud, the true American Master, wrote, in
my estimation, a volume slightly different from The Complete Stories ,
and the name of that slightly different volume ought to be, more cautiously,
Selected Stories .
